10. Slim is better than heavy (eyeliner, clothing)
9. Moist is better than dry (skin, lips, eyes)
8. Illumination is better than darkness (face, hair)
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10. Everytime you read through your entry you found ANOTHER mistake, like the dangling participle in the VERY FIRST SENTENCE, so you figured why enter at all.
9. You printed out your copy and mailed it only realizing too late that it was suppose to be sent by email.
8. You kept changing scenes around at the last minute and realized your cozy mystery had turned into women's fiction. Then you had to start from scratch because women's fiction was full!
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10. Gerald's Game
9. Night Shift
8. Skelton Crew
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10. La Shawn Barber's Corner (La Shawn Barber)
9. Field Negro (Wayne Bennett)
8. Living Life Abundantly (Marenda Taylor)
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10. Belief! Without belief in yourself and your skills as a writer you won't go far. If you don't believe in yourself, why should anyone else? You must believe without a shadow of doubt that your work deserves to be on a bookstore shelf. Without BELIEF, the first 9 must-haves will be useless.
9. Dedication - you must dedicate yourself to writing the best possible works you can and to always learning about the craft of writing and the business of publishing and promoting.
8. Persistence - this is a slow moving business and you must be able to persevere no matter what. You WILL get rejection letters. Your work WILL be rejected. But it's a numbers game. Wade through the nos to get to that yes! Keep moving forward no matter the roadblocks.
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10. Caroline Lawrence
9. Ann Bryant
8. Jonny Zucker
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10. Confessions of a Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella
9. Crafty books by my creative girlfriends: Jill MacKay, Marie Browning, Katie Hacker & more
8. Books by Debbie Macomber - lots of 'um!
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10. Life lessons are available no matter where we look!
9. People who tell you negative things about others should probably be the number one suspect
8. It's in casual conversations that we reveal the most about ourselves.
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10. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
9. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
8. “He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”
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10. Broke & Beautiful
9. The Recessionista
8. Bargain Babe
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